Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - Central Banks and Their Policies

Abstract:

This paper aims to explore the effects of the ECB monetary policy on the Euro area yield curve. Using cointegration techniques, this paper investigates the long-run relationships among the EONIA and Euro area money market interest rates. Results show that presence of cointegration was rejected for maturities longer than six years, implying that European Central Bank monetary policy actions do not exert significant impact on the entire spectrum of the yield curve. In addition, we also consider the transmission of EONIA interest rate volatility to the money market interest rates using EGARCH models. We find that EONIA volatility is transmitted to short and medium-period interest rates, whereas longer-term rates are not affected.

A new multivariate approach is introduced to identify the middle class of a society and to measure its possible decline. The middle class is a properly defined central region in attribute space that contains a fixed portion of the population. The decline of the middle class is measured by comparing the dispersion of the middle class. The use of minimum volume ellipsoids and different notions of central regions is discussed in one and several dimensions. An empirical illustration is given using German data on income and wealth.

The theoretical literature has identified potential benefits and costs of close bank-firm relationships for both parties, suggesting possible reasons for firms being captured by banks and vice versa. In this paper we empirically explore the effects of long-lasting credit relationships on employment and asset growth of a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms in the period 1998-2003. The main findings are that relationship lending hampers the efforts of small firms to increase their size (especially in terms of employees), while it mitigates the negative growth of troubled, medium-large enterprises, thus supporting the hypothesis that small firms are captured by banks which, in turn, are captured by large firms.

International Economics - International Factor Movements and International Business - International Migration

Abstract:

We explore the nexus between North-South trade and migration in a cross country framework over the period 1990-2005. In addition to the relatively unexploited cross country framework, our main contribution resides in the search for heterogeneous responses of trade to migration according to different good typologies. Besides the usual distinction between homogeneous and dierentiated products dictated by the information channel, we also investigate the eects of migration on trade in primary and nal goods and in labour and capital intensive goods with the purpose to assess the preferences and technology channels too. Our results show that, as expected, migration enhances the imports of primary and nal goods (preferences channel) and the exports of dierentiated-low elasticity of substitution goods (information channel). On the other hand, there is some evidence that the increase in the presence of migrants from the South enhances the exports of labour intensive goods (technology channel).

This paper analyses theoretically and empirically the effects of immigration on the wage rate of native workers. Empirical literature rarely finds that immigration generates a fall in the wages of manual workers. The theoretical model presented in this paper justifies those results, by hypothesizing an economic system where advanced firms buy an intermediate good from traditional firms, which employ manual workers in both clean and dirty tasks, the latter being more disliked by native workers. We conclude that native skilled wages always increase whereas native unskilled wages can both increase or decrease with immigration. An empirical analysis of the Italian labour market follows, showing that all native workers' wages rise with immigration.

This paper explores the determinants of the heterogeneity in the expenditure behaviors of the Italian households, using the Households Expenditure Survey provided by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) for the year 2005. We assume that differences among consumers are associated with differences in their economic and socio-demographic characteristics (such as gender, employment status and age of the householder, number of household components, presence of under 18 years old components), and we look for those characteristics that better differentiate groups of households according to their purchasing patterns. We apply a nonparametric discriminant analysis based on the various expenditure budget components, and detect the most discriminating partitions of families. The technique allows us also to identify the specific goods of consumption that significantly differ across the groups identified by the best partitions. We then study the different effects of the price dynamics on subgroups of households, and propose consumer price indices specific for the optimal households groups